At The Village Voice in the 1960s, pop music criticism was born as a self-consciously intellectual pursuit. Influential early critics Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau were given wide latitude to blend their enthusiasm for rock music with their desire to critique it as art. As Drexel University professor Devon Powers shows in her book Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, Goldstein and Christgau navigated the quickly developing rock music industry with a passion that fit with those heady literary times, when writers like Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, Ellen Willis, Truman Capote, Pauline Kael, and others were stretching the boundaries of what counted as journalism, fiction, and arts criticism.

Powers’ book focuses on Goldstein and Christgau’s divergent approaches to the late-60s music promotion hype machine-- which happens to be very similar to the 21st century version. Goldstein started off as a Warhol-indebted believer in the transformative power of Pop, though his quick spiral into absolute disillusionment with critics’ and publicists’ roles in the overexposure of young artists led to his valorization of a self-consciously politicized "underground." Christgau, on the other hand, reacted to the pop machine by breaking the fourth wall, freely admitting to his readers that though he tried hard, he could only get through so many vinyl promos in a single week. This led to his trailblazing Consumer Guide format and letter grade system, which he designed to simultaneously negotiate and critique the glut of new releases.

I talked on the phone with Powers about Goldstein and Christgau, the development of "hype," critics’ struggles with late-60s identity politics, and the current state of the form.

"We need music criticism because people like writing it
and people like reading it. It’s as simple as that."

Pitchfork: You open your book talking about how The Voice initially grew out of a bona fide bohemian culture, and balanced a stylistic sense of anti-professionalism and radicalism with clear commercial aims.

Devin Powers: The Voice was born in a moment in the 50s where there was a lot of iconoclastic intellectual fulfillment going on. There was a desire to remake what journalism could be and to see different kinds of writing emerge. At the same time, though, the desire among Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher, the editor and the publisher of The Voice, was to make it commercially viable. Over the early 20th century, you see a lot of publications crop up and disappear, or publications that were not able to pay their writers very much. It’s difficult to balance that, and that's an issue you continue to see, particularly among radical publications that want to both do something really new but also do it in a viable way.

Pitchfork: One of the threads of the last half-century has been how capitalism has been able to efficiently feed off of the counterculture.

DP: Yeah. But, looking at The Voice, it's interesting to see how capitalism can be a really, really good engine for distributing and circulating all kinds of stuff. Whether that’s pop music or movies, or very niche cultural production, all of it circulates through a money system. The smaller entrepreneurial forms of capitalism feel more intimate to some, but it’s still capitalism. And I still think there’s a little hesitancy in saying, "Yes, this is a commercial enterprise, we’re here to make money."

Pitchfork: As part of The Voice’s mission, it became known as a "writer’s paper," where editors didn’t get in the way of people who wanted to freely express themselves in different styles.

DP: Absolutely. This was a moment where people like Truman Capote were writing book-length non-fiction, and it’s just before people like Tom Wolfe start capitalizing on what was being called "new journalism." The boundaries of writing were stretching, in terms of language, form, and length. And The Voice was really pushing those margins. They were revolutionary in imagining writing that didn’t have to look like a traditional news story, writing that could have first-person perspectives, or make-up words, or curse. All of these things were really new in this period.

Pitchfork: The first column at The Voice to do this with music was Richard Goldstein’s "Pop Eye". He wasn’t there for very long, but he developed a unique way to approach music intellectually and enthusiastically at the same time.

DP: Goldstein started writing at The Village Voice in 1966, after finishing his masters in journalism at Columbia. He wanted to write about pop with a capital P: It’s mass culture, it’s democratic, but at the same time, it can be cunning, smart, tongue-in-cheek. At this point, no one else was taking that approach. You can see a juxtaposition with Crawdaddy, which was Paul Williams’ publication. Where Williams really just wanted to be serious, Goldstein wanted to be meta. He was friends with Bob Christgau and Ellen Willis, and they’re starting to figure out, "How do we develop a new language for talking about music?"

Pitchfork: One of the fascinating and, in a way, tragic things about Goldstein's story is the identity crisis that he developed in public through his writing. At first, he embraced pop. But he quickly started resenting its commercialization and valorizing the underground.

DP: The "underground" is an idea that Goldstein is key in developing. Not to say that there weren’t people covering things out of the limelight before, but he's central to the use of the word "underground" and this idea that there is a submerged culture happening on its own terms. At first, Richard gets very fired up about the possibilities of pop to radically reinvent society. Remember, it’s the 1960s, so we’re talking about the beliefs of the counterculture for world change. All of this infuses him and his writing. Very quickly, though, he gets jaded, as I think many people in their late 20s can relate to. But also, when we think about rock in the 60s getting completely commercialized, we don’t realize that it happened in the span of 28 months, really. The big money started falling in, which has an ironic relationship to the music. It helps the music to spread but at the same time, especially for somebody who was on the ground observing it, it could be a very depressing change.

Pitchfork: You write about Goldstein using the hippie scene in the Bay Area as a case study for these changes.

DP: He’s paying a lot of attention to San Francisco at that moment, to the Haight-Ashbury, with the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Jefferson Airplane. He’s seeing what’s happening to those bands that, in a very short period of time, start to see the wider knowledge of that subculture exploding. This starts to change his beliefs about what his writing and music criticism can actually do. It’s the first moment when rock critics start to become very aware of their promotional role. They’re not just writing about music that they love, but they’re also promoting it, no matter what they say. It was an unsettling proposition: Media could not only shine a light on something, but could also quickly overexpose it.

"When we think about rock in the 60s getting
completely commercialized, we don’t realize that it
happened very quickly, in the span of 28 months, really."

Pitchfork: And from here, the book gets into the idea of hype.

DP: Hype is one of my favorite topics. Hype is a word that gets attached to pop music right around 1968, in the wake of the Monterey Pop Festival and the signing of Big Brother and the Holding Company. All of this is happening against the backdrop of the increasing power and clout and size of the popular music industry. People like Richard Goldstein started to see a direct connection between those things, and the idea that this cycle could spiral out of control was incredibly unsettling. Critics started to backlash against the cycle, trying to stem the tide that they participated in creating. That’s where "hype" emerges.

Pitchfork: An interesting thing you discuss is Goldstein developing a defense mechanism against hype by embracing artists who he can define as "authentic" and who exemplify an idea of "community."

DP: The thing that’s consistent about Goldstein is that he believes very strongly in the possibilities for radical change based out of a 60s ethos. What starts to happen very quickly over the final years of the 1960s is that it balloons out of control. You start to see a lot of people who maybe dress or talk in a particular way, but aren’t aligned to the political and philosophical sensibilities of the counterculture.

Pitchfork: In a way, you talk about how Goldstein’s ideas of authenticity and community were positioning rock as a new "folk" music.

DP: Yeah, that’s the irony of rock music. On the one hand, rock is commercial music, and on the other hand, rock music is community music. It has to be both, although those two things are contradictory: The more commercial the music became, the less it was linked to a particular place, scene, or kind of person. We can see parallels of that with any musical movement that starts out in a very small place. Hip-hop started in the South Bronx, but what happens after people who aren’t in the South Bronx are listening to it-- when kids who live in the suburbs are listening to this music. What does that mean? That’s the same thing that was happening with rock music at that particular time. And talking about something in folk terms is just a way of saying it belongs to a particular kind of people.

Pitchfork: A type of people that critics positioned themselves as part of.

DP: Yeah, critics were these kinds of people and spokespeople for them as well.

Pitchfork: Goldstein is gone from The Voice by early ‘69, and his exit corresponds with Robert Christgau signing on. His chapters in this book are fascinating, because he had a different way of dealing with hype and the critical and commercial imperatives of being a rock critic.

DP: Christgau is a workhorse, and that’s an identity he wears on his sleeve. He is very self-conscious about the fact that he is a critic and his own biases. He focuses on the process and labor of being a critic as a way of getting out of the problem that Goldstein had. It was Christgau’s way of thinking about the impact and the effect of his words on what he was writing about. He thought his way out of the problem.

Pitchfork: He develops the Consumer Guide format, which you describe as a "management strategy" for the flow of music he was receiving, as well as a "commentary" on criticism itself.

DP: Again, Christgau is hyper-aware. When he creates the Consumer Guide, he’s trying to figure out how to manage the workload of being a rock critic, which at that moment paled in comparison to the amount of music being produced today, but it’s still an incredible amount of music. You have to remember, he’s getting this music on record. He’s not skipping through tracks and listening to the first five seconds and then going to the next thing, as we’ve all done. He can, and does, listen to music for eight hours a day and still not listen to the entire stack of music. So, writing these short reviews and giving them letter grades was a way of saying, "How can I condense this workload and comment on what it means to be a critic?"

Pitchfork: Something that crystallizes in your book is how little has changed in terms of being a full-time critic and being part of a big promotional machine. Christgau’s first Consumer Guide came out in 1969. In 2013, the only real difference is the scope, not the process.

DP: The difference is the scope and also that people are a little more comfortable with it. There’s no assumption that there is even a choice that you might be able to do something different. Many critics probably experienced that awakening when they first started doing criticism. At first, it’s just awesome because they can go to shows and get music for free which, again, now everyone can do. But then they start to realize, "Huh, OK, anything that I do is serving the publicist." Another thing that’s different today is that everybody has to hustle in a way you didn’t quite have to when Christgau was coming up. People see that writing is a promotional tool for themselves also, so it’s part of the same game.

Pitchfork: You see Christgau’s "meta" approach to music criticism start to solidify the idea of a critical identity. And in the late 60s, identity politics was quickly on the rise with certain groups, along with the segmentation of listening audiences on the marketing end.

DP: Yes, and this all happens very quickly. With identity politics, the most prominent movement in the late 60s and early 70s is Black Power. There’s also feminism, the American Indian Movement, and the very first inklings of the gay rights movement. We can still see the fallout of these changes. At the same time, from a different perspective, marketers are getting wise to the fact that rock’s singular, unified "monoculture," for a lack of a better word, is not going to sustain itself for very long. Subgenres are emerging, and audiences are getting older and younger at the same time. People in their mid-20s and 30s are still listening to the same rock music that 11, 12, 13-year-olds are. How do you address all of these audiences at once? You have all these different kinds of people who may listen to the same thing, but not for the same reasons, and for the music industry, maybe shouldn’t have the same advertising.

Pitchfork: And in the late 60s, for all of its supposed progressive leanings and liberal leanings, The Village Voice was still a very straight, white, male-dominated publication.

DP: Yeah, and you have critics starting to think about their relationship as white males to the music that they were listening to. Another thing that happens in the late 60s that throws this in the face of critics is the blues revival. So not only do you have people like Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix drawing audiences of white hippies, but you also have Johnny Winters, a white albino blues guitarist, who’s getting a lot of attention. That raises a lot of questions for critics: What does it mean for white people to be playing this music? What does it mean for white audiences going to performances by black performers who are singing about racial oppression? There’s all these potential tensions happening between performer and audience, and between critics as a proxy for the audience.

"Monoculture is a problematic idea insofar as that it assumes people are interpreting things in the same way-- even if there are a limited number of musicians on the radio, that doesn’t mean everybody
who is hearing them is hearing the exact same thing."

Pitchfork: A character pops up in your book that I had never been aware of before: Carman Moore, the only black critic at The Voice at the time. He really introduces, for many reasons, an interesting new perspective in discussions of race and appropriation.

DP: Carman Moore is actually a classical music composer. He starts at The Voice as a classical music critic for new classical music-- John Cage and Yoko Ono. Then he starts writing about rock music, and soul, and blues. As the only black music critic, and the first black rock critic in the country, he’s in a really interesting position. On the one hand, coming up through classical music, which is an incredibly white genre, he has a very integrationist perspective on the potential for music to bring people together. What you see in Moore’s writing is what happens to a lot of black people over the course of the mid-to-late 60s, which is a kind of soul consciousness. This directly correlates to people like James Brown and Aretha Franklin, and the consciousness-raising in their music.

Pitchfork: At the time, a lot of Moore’s Black Power contemporaries were arguing that terms like "rock," "soul," and "R&B" were racist, to which he pragmatically replied, "as a scribe, I need proper nouns desperately." I think this is a really concise and brilliant way to talk about how genres are formed. Writers need to briefly sum up an idea or link together a group of varied artists.

DP: It magnifies those issues in a very intense way because Moore’s writing about them at a moment when racial politics are so heated, so that to say something is "R&B" is suddenly a political statement. And the thing that’s difficult as well, then and now, is that the things that writers think about are not often the same things that audiences think about. Critics are thinking about things like the economy of language, structure, how to make a complicated argument very brief. Every time you make those choices, you’re making linguistic choices, political choices, and cultural choices that can be interpreted in many different ways.

Pitchfork: Along this line, a part of Christgau’s writing legacy, which he’s dealt with for decades but which has stuck around after the rise of the internet is "monoculture." He admits very frankly that "I don’t think it’s such a bad idea that people learn the same history in school. I think it tends to ground people and give them something to respond to and react against." Your book gives a lot of context to 60s critics developing this idea.

DP: When Christgau talks about monoculture, he’s talking about the idea that there was a period before fragmentation. A period before audiences were segmented, where all kinds of people were listening to the same thing, some of it out of necessity just because there weren’t other options. When you have people who are listening to the same kind of things, they have something in common to talk about that they simply don’t when there is more variance in the media landscape.

But monoculture is a problematic idea insofar as that it assumes that at any given moment, people are interpreting things in the same way. Even if there is a limited number of musicians on the radio, that doesn’t mean that everybody who is hearing that is hearing the exact same thing. And it’s also an idealized way of seeing the world. It’s really an integrationist belief that media can bring people together, that it can create common ground and an understanding among people. That’s a nice idea, and many of us would be sympathetic to that idea. It’s just that we’ve become more disillusioned about those possibilities.

Pitchfork: Do you feel like the idea of monoculture-- that what I’m listening to is what everybody else is listening to-- is necessary for a critic to have in order to justify their position?

DP: I don’t. There’s merit in talking about what is dominant and what is popular. Popularity and monoculture are not exactly the same thing, but when you’re talking about and writing about the artists that are the most common, you are hooking into a wider conversation and a wider perspective. But at the same time, what people who care about popular music and write about popular music have to recognize is that-- and I hate to say this-- not that many people give a shit. [laughs] It’s a very small number of people who not only love music, but love it enough to write about it and read about it in their spare time. Many people just want to listen to music. They don’t want to necessarily think about the music they’re listening to. So this perspective that music is something that’s an intellectual object and fun to argue about with other people is a niche.

Pitchfork: That gets me to the current moment of music writing. A recent article in The Hollywood Reporter asked "Are Music Critics Pointless?" How would you respond to that question?

DP: We need music criticism because people like writing it and people like reading it. It’s as simple as that. Why do we need blogs about World of Warcraft? Why do we need people who want to talk about knitting? There’s a number of things that, if you’re outside of that culture, it seems strange or unnecessary. If you’re in it, though, it feels very necessary. They give meaning to life, they make you happy, they give you something to do. All of these things that people want to do. It’s a ridiculous argument to say, "Why do we need this stuff?" When you see a movie and you want to talk to your friends about it, are you not supposed to? It’s the same thing. I don’t think anyone should necessarily be able to dictate the way in which you talk to a community of your peers about something that you care about.

Pitchfork: In certain ways, the web has facilitated these conversations, but it’s not a monolithic entity. In other ways the web has helped facilitate a perspective on journalism that has dismantled what The Village Voice once was.

DP: The questions about journalism are very difficult questions-- anyone who tells you they know how things are going to end up is lying. There are still radios being produced, there are still player pianos being sold. [laughs] If the book has a mission, it’s the idea that those of us that work in knowledge-centered professions should be having more conversations with one another about what we do. Because in reality, even the people crunching the numbers don’t actually know what they’re doing, either. They’re just better at making up answers than we are. By binding together, we’re going to do a better job at inserting ourselves into these conversations in a proactive, rather than a reactive, way.